SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 27 July 2024
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
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Arthur C Clarke Award
This award has been given since 1987 for the best sf novel whose UK first edition was published during the previous calendar year, and consists of an inscribed bookend and a sum of money from a grant initially donated by Arthur C Clarke. In 2001 the prize money – until then a constant £1000 – was increased to £2001 as a gesture to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); it has since risen by ...
Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle's famous hero Sherlock Holmes (see Icons) was introduced as a scientific detective operating by rigorous logic – but Doyle's master-stroke was to show him through the eyes of his staunch but uncomprehending companion Doctor Watson, providing a human frame for what might have been an arid inspiration. Although Holmes stories did not always fully honour this template description, Holmes himself soon ...
Sinclair, Tollemache
(1825-1912) Scottish landowner, politician and author; he has been registered as the earliest-born person to have made a gramophone recording, a spoken comment laid down in 1906, but more precisely he was the earliest to record on a gramophone disc as opposed to a phonograph cylinder. In The Great Battle of Katsh-Tartar Bazardjik!! (coll 1877 chap), a polemical collection of stories, articles and squibs about nineteenth-century disputes between Russia and Turkey, one section is of ...
Green, I G
Pseudonym of US author Ira Greenblatt (? - ), in whose Time Beyond Time (1971) the hero is either killed by lightning or caught in a "time-nexus" and cast into a disease-free Atlantis, where he finds himself immortal and becomes embroiled in many exciting adventures with other characters similarly displaced in time and space. [JC]
Stein, Benjamin
(1944- ) US actor (as Ben Stein), lawyer, journalist and author, an advocate of intelligent design in Evolution, apparently arguing that a proper understanding of the theory of evolution showed that it led inevitably to Eugenics and the excesses of Nazi Germany. His first novel, On the Brink (1977) with Herbert Stein, depicts a ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...